An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It’s the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it’ll be fine. Size makes you fragile.
Dress your best on your execution day. Be extremely courteous to your assistant when you lose money. Try not to blame others for your fate, even if they deserve blame. Never exhibit any self-pity. Do not complain.
Also, it’s good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who’s also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.
The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds.
Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually .
Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act – if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative.
When you beat up someone physically, you get exercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.
We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future-but this is not necessarily a bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.
Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.
In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
Learn to fail with pride – and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error – by mastering the error part.
There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.
Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.
A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see.
When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.
Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
I’m a private intellectual, not a public one.